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AIXpert Blog is about the AIX operating system from IBM running on POWER based machines called Power Systems and software related to it like PowerVM for virtualisation, PowerVC for Deploying VM's and PowerSC for security plus performance monitoring and nmon

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IBM announced lots of Power Systems software yesterday but the official announcements are pretty thin on the details. I have many Twitter tweets asking "What the heck does that all really mean?" and the official statements are marketing messages and not technical information like:

How do you get that working?

What are the pre-reqs?

What are the actual commands?

What does the Graphical User Interface look like?

How does that help me as a System Admin person?

How, in the 21st century, IBM can announce a new product without a single picture is totally beyond me?

But every problem opens up opportunities and so I attempt to fill the gap and learn a lot in the process - I cover only the core Power Systems, HMC, Firmware/Hypervisor and VIOS and AIX details. There are lots of higher level solutions and software products that are not covered here.

The big three totally new features and four middle size updates and some smaller ones:

PowerVC

The new virtualisation tool to manage your virtual machine life cycles: capture & deploy rapidly using tunable templates for AIX and Linux on POWER, then dynamically change the VM (better than other x86 based tools) and migrate between machines (LPM).

You run a Java package on your workstation this connects to agents on the HMC and machine and it FULLY understands the architecture of your POWER7 or POWER7+ machine so you actually "see" exactly where on your machine the LPARs are running. Then can drill down to load of details. All done on a easy to understand GUI.

My colleague Gareth Coates has this running in the beta test on our Power 795 and Power 770. Gareth, has plans to create a movie on PowerVP in the near future.

Shared Storage Pools phase 4

OK not totally new product but a major new function for SSP.

SSP4 now supports mirroring the pool LUN's so you can have the two copies on two different disk sub-systems which could be in different locations for Disaster Recovery.

I am a BIG FAN of SSP and use them everywhere on my test system to save me time.

There is also a WPAR update via an Alternative Disk Install method - this gives you a simple back out method if it goes wrong and you want to return to the original state. No video on this feature.

VIOS "part" Performance Advisor

Another update to the performance advisor that now comes default installed in the last few VIOS versions. There are lots of improvements including Shared Storage Pool stats (if you are using SSP) and SEA stats. Also Fibre Channel and NPIV but my VIOS did not have these in use.

I now think this tool is so good that every one should be running it regularly and getting the results to a web server so they can make quick checks on ALL the running Virtual I/O Servers in the computer room.

This adds a new option that helps if you have lots of file changes going on in your rootvg file systems. mksysb lists the files it wants to backup and then backs them up but if files are deleted between these operations then it complains that there are missing files. This may cause problems with some applications as the backup may not have a time consistent set of files.

The solution is to use the mksysb -T option and it makes a snapshot of the JFS2 file systems and then backs up the snapshot so no changes can be made. I will not make a movie about this as its pretty obvious what it does - you should be able to see the JFS2 snapshots while the backup is made and they get removed at the end. List JFS2 snapshot for a filesystem with: # snapshot -q /home

If you already use JFS snapshot, take care and read the manual page for mksysb for details.

Power 770 MMB model to get Firmware level 780 includes DPO

This requires a matching HMC upgrade. I have been waiting for this for a long time and it is very important ... because I have a personal Power 770 MMB :-)

This gives users with these older machines the newer Hypervisor functions and in particular Dynamic Platform Optimizer (DPO) or "LPAR shuffler" as its friend call it. This will move LPARs around to improve the CPU and memory affinity and can improve performance in the worst case drastically. This is the latest DPO version that gives you the affinity scores for individual LPARs.

This level of firmware has lots of other RAS features too so its worth the pain of the major update.

Similar functions already available on later models of Power 770 (MMC & MMD) with firmware 770 or firmware 780.

My colleague Gareth Coates plans to make a movie on the new DPO features on Power 770 and may even include PowerVP to show the before and after LPAR.placement.

By the way I was shocked when Gareth said he was currently updating the Power 770 to pre-release beta level firmware and would bounce the box shortly - I thought "Hang on a minute! It is running my important internal Wiki Web Server and the machine room DNS server!" - Gareth then said "Nigel stop worrying. I LPMed it to the Power 750 ten minutes ago". Sometimes I forget that our Power machines are so cool! And flexible, and reliable and . . .

Also a few smaller items that are still worth noting as these can save you time:

The VIOS Shared Ethernet Adapter Fail-over no longer requires the system admin to set up the control channel between VIO Servers previously this was manually setup (nearly every one uses channel 99) but now the system will do this for you.

Virtual Ethernet Link error warnings - A virtual network can't fail in the sense of a missing or broken cable as it does not have them so it does not raise any Link level status errors. Some application with real network will take recovery actions on Link Down warnings but can't with virtual networks. A new feature will regularly "ping" a resource across the virtual network to remote physical networks and if the "ping" fails raise a virtual Link Down errors on the virtual network. The application then get the warning and can act on it.

PowerSC (security and Compliance) has three improvements. It adds compliance testing for Linux on POWER servers. The Trusted Firewall now monitors traffic and recommends new Firewall rules that may increase performance further by avoiding external networks and external firewall for traffic between virtual machines. The Trusted Network Connect and Patch can now work down to the iFix level.

Well that is my top 10, I hope this helps you get to grips with the announcements and saves you time or adds a few cool tools to your tool box.

Gareth and I will be creating more videos in the near future and will update this page and Tweet via handles @power_gaz and @mr_nmon

Did I miss on you thought was important? Let me know in the comments below.